My room was very nice…along with the rest of the hotel, it had ultra hip drawings, paintings, and color scheme. In their ads, they call it a ‘Funky Design Hotel’. Some of the quotes painted on the walls were thought provoking, but most were funny. Nearly all of them in English. The bathroom had a very dark color scheme which didn’t quite go with the bright and airy room, but, it served it’s purpose. If you’ve never stayed in a hostel, they really do save you quite a bit of money. For instance, I was paying 22€/night here for a shared room where a private room would have cost me 55€. And the 22€ per night here is kind of spendy as most hostels charge under 20€. Can’t remember why I chose this one as it was a spur of the moment decision to go to Prague. But I did tend to read all reviews about a potential place I’d be staying. I pretty much only used hostels.com. If I was to go back to Prague this coming May, I’d stay here: Prague Tyn. It’s only $22/night for a private room, comes with breakfast. Should have stayed there instead of the Fusion.
When you’re a sightseeing traveller, you hardly do anything in your room except shower and sleep so having other people share the space isn’t that big a deal. In my room, there were 4 beds, but most people only stay one night and travel on, there were two nights here in Prague when I had the room to myself. Sometimes you’ll have women roommates, other times someone will be a snorer (all hostels sell foam ear plugs, this hostel had them at 3 freaking Euros !!! a pair when all over the world they are usually much much less).
Next morning, I wandered downstairs (my room was on the 2nd floor) and ordered a breakfast prominently featured on the menu board. This place didn’t have free breakfast like most hostels. I ordered scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, and toast. For around 5€. It was terrible. The eggs were under cooked…ruiny. The bacon…way undercooked, the fat was still white. Toast was under cooked. Coffee was weak. Gah. Horrible. The cook had no idea how to prepare a breakfast. Guess that’s why I saw so many people ordering porridge or cold cereal for breakfast. I picked at the meal and did find the sausages eatable, and a bit of the eggs. The bacon? No.
After that poor assed excuse for a breakfast, joined the tour group of about 25 people and off we went to join our guide. Hostel staff guided us to a street corner and then we waited for our tour guide. We’re standing around, I’m noticing many notices and street signs and I’ve now been here in Prague for a few hours and have noticed that I cannot make sense of a single word in Czech that I’ve seen. In Italy and France, at least once in a while I could make out a words meaning, a street name, a service, a type of business, etc., but not here in Prague. I could not figure out a thing. So I asked the tour assembler, are there any tricks to trying to figure out your language you could teach me? Any simplified rules? He looks at me in all seriousness and says, “Don’t even try”. Hah! Funny.
And, “I could not figure out a thing”, is “Nemohl jsem přijít na věc” in Czech. See what I mean? Where’s the pronoun? So street names, signs on buildings, menus, etc. were just Greek to me. Here’s a building. Loved the pattern.
And then our tour guide showed up and off we went. 
Lots of beautiful buildings in downtown Prague. Then we got a tour of this old church. Can’t remember a thing about it though.
And then we started climbing up the hill. This was the Kings area. Had his palaces up here. Back when they had a king. Very impressive. Quite the views.
We had come up a different way, almost as steep, but our guide tells us we’ll be going back down into the city this way… 
Believe it or not, this is/was part of the palace. Queens section I believe. Not quite the same ornate ostentatiousness that you’d find in France though.
When the Soviet Union started to crumble, but before they started releasing countries like Czechoslovakia from that union, the young people were marching, protesting, demanding freedom. Many landed in prison because the ‘ruler’ was a staunch communist. Here’s where the people expressed their anger. Now it’s kind of a sacred site to those who remember living under the soviet iron fist.
Then we crossed a bridge and I spotted this interesting, working, paddlewheel. Don’t know what the figure is about but the paddlewheel is still a functional power source for the bakery in that building. It’s grinding wheat right at the moment.
The marks on the side of this building are how high the water has gotten here when the river overflowed. It’s since been tamed by a dam. And…John Lennon once visited this pub. One of the few signs I saw in Prague that was in English.
This is the Charles Bridge and is famous for some reason. And very old. 
Has all these medieval statues of popes on it.
And this is the river that use to flood the town every so often, the Vltava River. 
And here we’re on Charles Bridge. Its construction started in 1357 under the auspices of King Charles IV, and finished in the beginning of the 15th century. As you’d imagine with a bridge this old, there are plenty of stories about it. These statues are suppose to bring you good luck or get you preggers or something. I forget, but our guide stopped here and gave us a long story about them.
I believe this is a statue of Good King Wenceslas, like from the xmas song, in the picture below. Nope, just checked and I’m wrong, this is outside St. Salvator Church so I guess this is St. Salvator.
Those crazy statues up on top the church were interesting…lucky they don’t have many earthquakes in this area.
So after wandering around for a while, we go under the bridge and find this boat ride. You don’t have to take it, but all of our group did. Doesn’t cost all that much. 
Our sailors were dressed kind of sloppily but I did notice that they all knew exactly what they were doing with the boat. So that was good. The gurls were both competent and really cute. This part of the tour on the river took around 40 minutes where we cruised up, down, then back to this slip. The gal gave us a running commentary on the history of things we passed.
We passed nearby that paddlewheel in our meanderings on the river.
And this is The Prague astronomical clock. The oldest working astronomical clock in the world. Cool. 
The clock really drew a crowd every time it chimed. There are some carvings of apostles that come out once per day or something. And in a random way. Including Judas. I happened to be in the square when he came out and the crowd gasp! Oh, brother. Seems that the randomness is set so he only comes out once in a great while. Like months between visits. Suppose to mean something. But I forget the legend.
This is old town square. Kinda cool here.
And after around 5 hours, we ended up in a neat basement restaurant. We did have to pay for our meal but again, not that expensive. Look at this place though. These tunnels were built over 1000 years ago. Used over the ages as both dungeons and storage. What we had to eat was a historical meal of beef stew, bread, and beer. It was good, and filling too.
You can see how narrow many streets we walked on are in Prague. Funny thing was that over our 6 hour tour of the city, we kept running into antique cars, in mint condition. Sportsters, Cords, Model T’s, that sort of thing. Just parked alongside the road on these narrow streets. Then, one time, we were all following our guide single file down a narrow road and this gold Hummer (or is it Humvee?) with dark tinted windows drives by us. I’m right behind the guide and he’s been talking all the while and I stop to look at the Hummer. Everyone behind me has stopped and is gazing at this thing too. Our guide keeps talking and walking until he realizes he can’t hear us behind him. Stops and turns around. Sees us all watching the car and calls out, “Russian”. We all go, “Ahhhh”. I was less than a foot from the thing and I’d swear it was real 24ct gold paint. I’m still angry at myself for not taking a picture of a single one of those really cool cars.
After that nice, but tiring because of the steep hills, tour we headed back to the hostel. I grabbed my Android and once again had a nice dinner at The Green Tomato. Yumm. Perfect, just like the night before.
OK, that’s the 2nd day in Prague. I got lucky and there wasn’t anyone in my room the 2nd night so I didn’t have to worry about disturbing, or being disturbed by anyone. Did spend a couple hours in the 360 bar people watching before bed. That was fun. Also surfed the web and made arrangements for a hostel in Berlin and bought bus tickets for the travel. Yeah, bus. Sounded like an adventure at the time. I’d been talking to some kids in the hostel and they were telling me how comfortable the long distance buses were in the Czech Republic. And I wanted a look at the country outside of Prague, and hopefully, a look at a village. Now that the Soviets were gone I thought that might be interesting. You know, to see how far they’d progressed in the 20 odd years since the breakup happened. The bus trip isn’t that long, and it’s only $50 USD so it’s economical too.
See you next time.